The skills gap is a learning gap

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Continuous learning, lifelong learning, learning organizations, and constant learning – terms we hear every day about the changing nature of the workplace. We don’t even know what skills to prepare for, but most people agree that we all need to keep on learning if we wish to remain relevant at work, in our professions, or in life. Just watch how new technology is adopted by people of my age. It can be painful.

With technology accelerating change in the marketplace and automation replacing highly skilled workers with robots, the decision to invest in any particular set of skills is far from obvious.  Empty platitudes about “upgrading skills” and “investing in our people” will not suffice.  We need to start thinking seriously about viable strategies to manage the skills gap. – Digital Tonto

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The Internet of Everyone

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Technology will rapidly change, consolidate, and probably change again. – John Chambers

Stop chasing the latest technology wave. It’s much better to make sense of it while also watching for the next wave. These waves of technology will most likely come faster and faster with the Internet of Everything (IoE). Faster feedback loops will be built into all product development cycles. Cloud-based technologies will mean constant change, much of it not even seen by end-users. As a result, better ways to negotiate a connected world will have to be developed. These will have to be human-centric if we expect them to last. Processes, data, and things may be able to change quickly, but people do not. While they may be agile, adaptable, and flexible, people cannot get a new operating system and start working in a different way overnight.

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Learning to breathe in the network era

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The networked workplace is the new reality. It’s always on and globally connected. This is where all organizations are going, at different speeds and in a variety of ways. Some won’t make it. In many organizations the outside world is better connected than inside the workplace. This makes it difficult to connect at the boundaries, which is where we have the best opportunities for serendipity and potential innovation.

At the edge of the organization, where there are few rules; everything is a blur. It may even be chaotic. But opportunities are found in chaos. Value emerges from forays into the chaos. In such a changing environment, failure has to be tolerated. Nothing is guaranteed other than the fact that not playing here puts any organization at a significant disadvantage.

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Social leaders create value

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Simon Terry’s value maturity model is based on the guiding principle of collaboration at the organizational level, not the process level. This means everyone has to be connected to the overall mission, and not just focused on their part. Goal oriented conversations keep all people in the organization connected.

An employee who is challenged to integrate his or her work at the level of the goals of the organisation has an opportunity to stop, change or transform the process. That employee can respond to the situation before them, use their discretion and use the talents of their colleagues. The employee can look to deliver greater value than the current process allows. That liberty reinforces their accountability and validates the organisations confidence in the potential of the employee. A key barrier to engagement in many organisations is that an employee can struggle to find the connection between their work and the goals of the organisation. Goal-oriented conversations can play a critical role to surface that connection. —Simon Terry

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People and the Wild Internet of Everything

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“Cisco’s view is that IoE technically differs from the Internet of Things; IoT is composed of connected objects, while IoE encompasses the networks that must support all the data these objects generate and transmit. “Software by itself won’t get the job done,” Chambers said at Interop in October, arguing that IoE demands data center software and hardware that work in concert.” – Information Week

Software is part of the solution. Hardware is part of the solution. People are the other part. Humans can connect complex things together better than any software or hardware system. It remains that the only practical interface with complexity is the human brain. It’s why the Turing test, to the chagrin of technology  marketers, has never been passed by a machine.

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ESN as knowledge bridges

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An effective suite of enterprise social tools can help organizations share knowledge, collaborate, and cooperate – connecting the work being done with the identification of new opportunities and ideas. In an age when everything is getting connected, it only makes sense to have platforms in place that enable faster feedback loops inside the organization in order to deal with connected customers, suppliers, partners, and competitors. It takes a networked organization, staffed by people with networked mindsets, to thrive in a networked economy.

Enterprise social networks (ESN) are growing in usage in most large organizations. More employees are sharing knowledge through activity streams on platforms by IBM, SAP, Jive, Yammer, and Socialcast, to name a few.  But ESN can constrain what they are supposed to enhance. Due to the very personal and intimate nature of implicit knowledge, people will only freely share it if they feel they are in control. A single enterprise network does not provide much individual control.

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Revolutionalize Learning & Development

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Work is learning and learning is the work, says Clark Quinn. I agree.

Clark gives a clear path forward for today’s learning and development profession on the cusp of revolution or extinction in his latest book. Revolutionize Learning & Development is required reading for anyone involved in training, instruction, or corporate education. I have known Clark for many years and in this book he makes the case for change very clear. He maps the path to align learning with work. If learning is the solution to the business situation, then this book will explain how to make it so.

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Work is changing

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Here are some observations and insights that were shared on social media this past fortnight. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“The nature of work is changing. People’s relationship with work is changing. The changes to society will be vast.” – @gapingvoid

Andrew McAfee: offshoring is a way station on the way to automation – via @ebala

The research is clear that technological progress has greatly benefitted people in the developing world so far. I wonder, though, if automation and deindustrialization might be creating a ‘silicon ceiling’ on growth — a situation in which even low wages are no longer an attractive alternative to technology. If so, the global shift away from labor and toward capital will only accelerate.

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social leadership

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What is social leadership? Simply put, it’s shifting the focus from you to we. All organizational leaders are part of complex human social networks. The great fallacy of leadership is that leaders control.

“Control is a mirage. The most effective leaders right now–men and women–are those who embrace traits once considered feminine: Empathy. Vulnerability. Humility. Inclusiveness. Generosity. Balance. Patience.” —Leigh Buchanan, Inc. Magazine

These traits need to be combined with one single mission: to create better work environments. Social leaders understand that first we shape our structures, and then our structures shape us. Working on the business means working on how the organization is designed. The Milgram and Stanford Prison experiments have shown us that if you put a good person in a bad system, the system always wins.

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Work Out Loud Week

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Sharing complex knowledge requires trust, but developing trusted knowledge networks does not happen over night. It requires a combination of actively engaged knowledge workers, using effective communications tools, all within a supportive organizational structure.

In complex work environments, the optimal way to do work is to constantly probe the environment and test emergent practices. This requires an empowered workforce. Emergent practices are dependent on the cooperation of all workers (including management) as well as the free flow of knowledge.

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